World of books

By A N Wilson

12:01AM BST 26 Apr 2004

Foreign literature should not be a closed book

Since there won't be a European superstate (what those of us who want it would think of as a revival of the Holy Roman Empire), it seems rather pointless to have a referendum on the subject. Until the Return of Charlemagne, we European dreamers must live in books - but where will we find them?

I went into Blackwell's bookshop in Charing Cross Road the other day. I'd been recommended to read the novels of Bernhard Schlink. There they were in an English translation, but, since I am learning German, I thought it would be fun to see if I could read his books in the original language. Having surveyed the wall full of books offering language courses, and an even larger section devoted to linguistics, I was unable to find any books by Schlink.

Or, come to that, books by Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Klopstock, Herder, Heine, Rilke, Sebald, Boll or Broch The very polite woman at the desk directed me to the "foreign literature" section, where I found that there were, in fact, no books in German on offer at all. Quite a contrast to the Blackwell's in Oxford where there is an excellent foreign literature department.

But here I was, in the middle of London, a city of eight million souls, some 100,000 of whom, I believe, have German as their first language. And I was in an academic bookshop that did not contain a single book in the German language, except books teaching the language itself. The French books filled approximately one and a half shelves, with a couple of Camus novels, some predictable Michel Houellebecq, and that was about it. Italian literature was represented by Italo Calvino.

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I do not remember seeing any Dante, Petrarch, Tasso or Ariosto. There was one book by Umberto Eco, but nothing by Primo Levi whose books are short, accessible and who - without my being too pompous about it - is surely one of those authors everyone "ought" to read? Spanish literature was equally poorly represented.

This is not designed as a diatribe against Blackwell's. I know that if I went to any branch of Waterstone's, however huge, I should probably find even fewer books written in a foreign language. In the supposedly highbrow new London Review Bookshop near the British Museum, there is almost no foreign-language literature, an omission that seems truly a sign of the times.

The words "Foreign Language" in bookshops apply merely to books designed to give you a good spoken understanding of the language. Because language teaching in English schools is so lousy, there is a lot of language-learning among grown-ups. A high proportion of the intelligent young Europeans in London earn their living, or part of it, by teaching their language to badly educated Brits.

When I first went to a London language school a year ago and said I wanted to learn German properly, I was their only client who wanted to do so for the purposes of reading. They had plenty who were being sent to Zurich or Frankfurt by banks or law firms and who needed to be able to speak fluently when they got there. Rather fewer people were queueing up to be able to understand the operas of Wagner or get their minds round Hegel or enter the mighty mind of Goethe.

It makes me feel like a swot and a prig saying that the thing I most passionately want to do before I die is to catch up on lost time and read the great works of European literature in their original languages. I know I shall fail, but I want to try. All our forebears tried to do this.

Most Britons who deemed themselves educated could read at least one foreign language. I am not hoping to be as clever as Queen Elizabeth I who, when the students of Oxford greeted her with Greek verse, could reply in that language, and who was fluent in Italian and French. But surely I might be as bright as those sofa-bound misses of the Byronic age who read Moliere and Tasso, and perhaps Goethe too.

I might even aspire to be as interested in foreign literature as my parents' generation, which collected the old Penguin poets, beautifully produced cheap books in which the principal works of the foreign poet were reprinted, along with plain, accurate prose translations. (The David Luke Goethe and the John Fennell Pushkin are especially treasured books on my shelves).

The absence of European literature from the shelves of the big London bookshops would not perhaps mean very much if there were any big retailers that catered for such "specialist" tastes. But there are only two shops that even attempt to do so, and they are not especially large .

So I shan't be very interested in the so-called debate about the European constitution. How can this country even begin to talk about what it means to be a European country if the greatest literature produced by the human race remains not merely a closed, but an unavailable book to the British people?